Harry Papapanagos

TAX REFORM AND PROGRESSIVITY

The established theory of tax progressivity cannot handle basic tax reform questions, such as whether an increase in personal allowances makes the tax system more progressive, because the core results assume that tax liability is never zero. This paper generalises the core theory to allow for zero tax payments, and applies the new framework to the analysis of allowances, income-related deductions and tax credits. Log concavity of the tax schedule--a property quite distinct from any existing notion of progressivity--emerges as the critical determinant of whether the distribution of the tax burden becomes more progressive as allowances are increased.

Inflation and Stabilisation in Albania

This article analyses the determinants of inflation in Albania during the transition period. We attempt to explain why Albania was successful in reducing inflation, by the end of 1995, to a level comparable to many countries in the European Union. We discuss the relative importance of monetary, fiscal and external variables, and we highlight the role of remittances by emigrants. Using vector autoregression analysis, we demonstrate how shocks to money growth and remittances affect the subsequent paths of inflation and the exchange rate. Our main conclusion is that, while there are important lessons from the Albanian experience for other ex-communist countries, the presence of large-scale emigration and huge remittance flows makes Albania unique among European countries in transition, in the extent to which these factors aided the anti-inflation programme. However, recent events have demonstrated that political stability and control of the informal financial sector are also crucial for low inflation.

Emigration and the Optimal Speed of Transition

The paper presents a model of labor reallocation in a transition economy and analyzes the determinants of the optimal speed of transition. The model is extended to consider the effect of emigration flows from the transition country. In general, a rapid rather than slow pace of restructuring is preferable in the long run, but an initial period of gradualism may be optimal. The authors conclude that emigration, by improving the rate of job creation in the private sector and by reducing the burden of unemployment on the government, may lead to an earlier switch to rapid adjustment of labor, and hence to a faster transition to a market economy.

Marketing Ethics and Communication Strategy in the Case of Enron Fraud

Ethical discussion in marketing is still in its nascent stage. Marketing Ethics came of age only as late as 1990s. As it is the case with business ethics in general, marketing ethics too is approached from ethical perspectives of virtue, deontology, consequentialism, pragmatism, and also from relativist positions. However, there are extremely few articles published from the perspective of twentieth or twenty-first century philosophy of ethics. One impediment in defining marketing ethics is the difficulty of pointing out the agency responsible for the practice of ethics. Competition, rivalry among the firms, lack of autonomy of the persons at different levels of marketing hierarchy, nature of the products marketed, nature of the persons to whom products are marketed, the profit margin claimed, and everything relating the marketing field does make the agency of a marketing person just a cog in the wheel. Deprived of agency, the hierarchy of marketing hardly lets one with an opportunity to autonomously decide to be ethical. Without one having agency, one is deprived of the ethical choices.